Friday, December 20, 2013

Monday, December 16, 2013

That's a key question posed by the Pole of Cold team who are currently heading for Oymyakon, the coldest inhabited place in the world, to explore how communities cope with extreme cold. I've been thinking about this in the last few days, as we move towards Christmas which (when I was a lad) would guarantee freezing temperatures and plentiful snow....

What's the coldest you've ever been, and where were you at the time ?

Please tweet me a reply to @GeoBlogs, or add a blog comment below. Thanks to those folks who have already replied in the few minutes since I tweeted the original question...All replies will be much appreciated, and I will make use of them in some resources I am currently preparing... after all, I can't do nothing just because I'm on holiday....

While we're on the subject of winter, have some free Mission:Explore missions which are all primed and ready should we get a white Christmas, which is looking quite unlikely judging by the shirt-sleeve weather we currently have in Norfolk...

Saturday, December 14, 2013

This week, one of my favourite bands: Led Zeppelin finally had their albums added to Spotify.
This is a service I use for many hours every day... and also when travelling.There's a connection between this particular album and my current job.

The front cover of Houses of the Holy was designed by Aubrey Powell: a former pupil of King's Ely, where I now teach. He came to pay a visit earlier in the term... Rock on !

And of course there's a geographical connection with the landscape depicted on the album cover....

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

City, country and coast (and the spaces in between) are the settings for these journeys; here, the act of walking is, by turns, exploratory, destructive, restorative, defiant, contemplative and devotional. The poems and sequences in The Footing are The Strait (Angelina Ayers), Tithes (James Caruth), From a St Juliot to Beyond a Beeny (Mark Goodwin), Flights and Traverses (Rob Hindle), Three Night Walks (Andrew Hirst), Death and the Gallant (Chris Jones) and Breach (Fay Musselwhite).

The paths taken inThe Footing offer new perspectives on landscape, history and memory; each poem and sequence is marked by the unscreened, the unplanned, the unexpected.

As Rebecca Solnit says in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, ‘every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable…’

What is this blog about ?

Cultural Geography featured on the now-ex Pilot GCSE Geography Specification - that was my introduction to this area of geography. This blog started out featuring my findings, resources and images as I produced resources when teaching this unit for the first time. Some readers may disagree with what I call 'cultural geography' but I'm still relatively new to all this...

Some of the early content stems from ideas by Dr. Phil Wood , Senior Lecturer in Geographical Education at the University of Leicester.

The blog has now morphed into a general place to blog about geography and popular culture, as well as social science, mapping and a range of other cultural items of interest.